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Evolution 2007 Highlights

The meeting started in the Christchurch Town Hall (the same 1970 decor I remember from my childhood) with the usual awkward biculturalism; a hokey Māori welcome, thrilling the Americans but making the locals cringe, was followed by various middle-aged white men prefixing their speeches with a few words of mangled Māori. Hayley Lawrence showed how it was done, using English, Māori, and Mōriori in her presentation on tāiko (Pterodroma magentae), in which she confirmed that the type specimen of Magenta Petrel was indeed a tāiko, and suggested there may be some tāiko burrows yet to be found on main Chatham Katie Hartnup also used ancient DNA, to analyse Māori feather cloaks. She debunked the suggestion that one cloak was made with moa feathers, proving instead it was emu, probably from Governor George Grey’s private menagerie Lisa Matisoo-Smith and Andrew Clarke pieced together the story of Polynesians carrying chickens to Chile before Europeans had even heard of the place, bringing sweet potatoes and bottle gourds back–this was breaking news, as Matisoo-Smith’s paper was published that very day, but did you see a mention of it in the newspapers? Clarke, when pressed, revealed that the traditional Maori kūmara varieties “repatriated” some years ago from Japan, with much fanfare, were actually not that old Phylogeography seemed especially big this year; is it a powerful tool, or the current fad, encompassing problems of just the right size and complexity to fill a PhD? Time will tell. Anyway, numerous interesting stories came to light; for example, Otago and Australian blue penguins (Eudyptula minor) form a single clade, claimed Amanda Peucker (Deakin), sister to all other New Zealand E. minor, and the “white-flippered penguin” I remember from my old Fiat field guide is not a species at all There’s very little cuckolding going on with kiwis, says Karen Nutt. And given the amount of effort males put into parenting–incubating for nearly 80 days–you’d expect them to be worried about extra-pair copulations. Or perhaps they just don’t have the energy One controversy I missed whilst in America is over the supposed drowning of the New Zealand archipelago in the Oligocene, 22 million years ago. Tied into the “goodbye Gondwana” backlash, proponents claim the whole land mass was either submerged or reduced to just a few small islands (a critically important distinction, one would think, if you happened to be living there at the time). Adrian Paterson and Steve Trewick both advocated drowning or near-drowning in just this way, making a scientist sitting next to me’s blood boil. DNA evidence nevertheless seems to show rapid and recent radiation in some groups, like galaxiids, rata, and parakeets. How moa were supposed to have persisted on tiny islands nobody could say. What seems well-established, though, is the recent submergence of the Chathams, implying everything now
there dispersed across water within the last few million years Jeremy Kirchman reordered the flightless Pacific rails, collapsing a bevy of monotypic genera into Gallirallus, Porzana, and Porphyrio. The banded rail G. philippensis, incidentally, is not the ancestor of most Gallirallus, and isn’t even monophyletic Alison Campbell chilled my blood with the hidden history of New Zealanders stoutly resisting the teaching of evolution; until very recently official Ministry policy was against teachers claiming evolution was the only explanation for life (no doubt a symptom of the scrupulous fair-mindedness of kiwis). The new curriculum which for the first time builds evolution right into the foundations of science teaching is not yet approved, so let’s hope it survives The idea that sexually-selected characteristics displayed positive allometry was methodically demolished by Russell Bonduriansky ; the usual examples of positive allometry, like fiddler-crab claws, only get into the textbooks because they’re atypically weird, while model organisms don’t show noticible allometry of sex characteristics at all Nalini Puniamoorthy’s dancing dungflies provided some comic relief, and showed the importance of judiciously-chosen video in your PowerPoint show. It helps if you can keep up a deadpan commentary and drop in the occasional dry witticism, whilst behind you the dungflies are wriggling and cavorting Walter Jetz, using a huge dataset of birds and mammals, demonstrated that Bergmann’s rule seems to apply to birds but not mammals. I must admit to a bias towards graphs with thousands of data points on them Alan Cooper, in his talk on ancient DNA, mentioned in passing the meteor that struck North America 12,900 years ago, decimating the megafauna, and allowing humans to wipe them out. Amazing stuff, and Alan claimed to have seen plenty of physical evidence, though I’m going to remain agnostic until I see it in a peer-reviewed publication And to prove the doubters of catastrophism wrong, the snow arrived just in time to ruin the travel plans of all the Americans I’d been advising to visit the West Coast. Oh well.